ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Jewish Studies, in its search for an academic identity, has come to redefine Jewishness and reposition itself as a discipline over the past three decades—first in response to multiculturalism, and more recently in light of the “postethnic” turn proclaimed by David Hollinger. Using Kafka as my case study, I trace the evolution in scholarship dealing with the author’s Jewishness and examine the ways it has been conceptualized in relation to his literary production. I show how Kafka’s Jewishness is no longer defined in terms of a circumscribed or exclusionary cultural identity, but is instead celebrated for its transnational, translinguistic, transcultural character. In contrast to the first decades of Kafka’s postwar reception, which was profoundly binary in its approach—with scholars regarding his fiction as either German or Jewish—contemporary critics no longer think of the author’s Jewish identity in monolithic or discrete categories. I argue that this tendency reflects a broader shift in the identity politics of Jewish Studies, which has sought to move away from the margins of ethnic and area studies by refashioning Jewishness and modern Jewish culture in the terms of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and postcolonial hybridity.
